How Breaking Bad Helped End the War on Drugs

Sometimes pop culture and politics dovetail in the oddest ways. Breaking Bad kicked off its final run within a few hours of Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement all but declaring the war on drugs a failure. Walter White returned to his ruined home to search for the dose of ricin he had stashed behind an electrical outlet, foreshadowing that his story will end in total and abject degradation and (probably) death. Holder had a different kind of narcotics-related failure to declare. He didn't even have to mention that drugs are cheaper and more plentiful than ever. He just discussed America's imprisonment rate.

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"While the entire U.S. population has increased by about a third since 1980, the federal prison population has grown... by almost 800 percent. It's still growing — despite the fact that federal prisons are operating at nearly forty percent above capacity. Even though this country comprises just 5 percent of the world's population, we incarcerate almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. More than 219,000 federal inmates are currently behind bars. Almost half of them are serving time for drug-related crimes, and many have substance use disorders."

Holder is taking only a small step, restricting the use of mandatory minimum sentences for federal drug crimes, but the Obama administration's acknowledgment of the failure is a huge step, one with potentially enormous consequences. Ending the drug war would be one of Obama's true legacy achievements — on par with health care and immigration reform — not simply for itself, but also for what it would signify for an approach to all other social problems. For forty years, the campaign rested on the idea that drug abusers are weak, drug sellers are evil, and the job of the state is to lock them all up. That simplistic morality is mercifully coming to an end, partly thanks to books, movies, and TV. The culture industry's relentless assault on the war on drugs is finally starting to have some effect.

Of all the pop culture indictments of the drug war, Breaking Bad stands as the most profound, if only because so much of the world it depicts is so banal, so devoid of anything approaching glamour. The Wire — the other great TV show about drugs — was an elaborate systematic exploration of the economics of the narcotics trade, featuring characters like Bunny Colvin and Stringer Bell who sought to turn drugs into a business like any other. In Breaking Bad, however, drugs are already there. Whether Gustavo Fring's business is a meth company that uses chicken restaurants as a cover, or a chicken company that has merely diversified into meth doesn't matter when you consider that both are owned by Madrigal — a corporation with tens of thousands of employees and dozens of divisions. Product is product. Lydia — maybe Breaking Bad's most chilling character — is really only excited by the logistical nature of her job. She's a shipper. As for Walter White, none other than Warren Buffett has called him "a great businessman." And what could be squarer than earning the approval of the Oracle of Omaha?

Drugs reflect their times. They always have. The first great work of literature on the subject of illicit ecstasy was Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey. It was published in 1821, and no book captures more perfectly the spirit of that time. It is at once about emerging colonialism, the limits of the self, and the possibilities of universe-embracing transcendence; that's Romanticism in a nutshell. Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises was a classic of modernism because it reveled in the forms of distortion that drugs provide. Hunter S. Thompson's famous diet — with its carefully calibrated balance of Chivas and cocaine — is a quintessential document of 1970s excess.

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In our own time, drugs are less about the individual (note how Breaking Bad spends very little time on the actual experience of the drug use) and more about the corporate structure. Even the drugs favored by today's creative class are boringly work-oriented. Take Adderall, which the writer Cat Marnell has a half-million-dollar book deal to write about. Apart from being the world's most boring drug to read about, it's also the definitive corporate drug, allowing its consumers to focus without distraction. It is the perfect suit drug. The Russians have a saying: "He works like an American." The mania for Adderall is the ultimate proof of the correctness of that expression.

The war on drugs has been the most abject failure of any political program in American history. Despite our locking up hundreds of thousands of people on narcotics charges, drugs are cheaper, more potent, and better than ever before. The force of the connection between producer and consumer is stronger than anything the state can muster in opposition. Pretty much since 1971, when Nixon declared the war on drugs, television and movies have been showing us how ridiculous it was even to try. We can no more stop drugs than we can stop business. And in the end, I'm not sure what the more troubling lesson of Breaking Bad is: that meth is just another business, or that ordinary business is just the same as the meth trade.

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